Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  All bullshit, I think. All a freaking con. But I know how to deal with cons—give them time and ask questions. Any con man anywhere, on Eighth Avenue or on a hoops court in the Bronx or, probably, on any stream where guys like Gabe fish, will eventually lie to you so long and often that something will stop making sense.

  So I say, “You hadn’t factored in The Man Hater.”

  “Exactly,” he says, and now he’s swallowing hard, touching his face, scratching the side of his scalp—the guy is nervous.

  “No one warned you about her?” I say. “When you first started teaching at this university?”

  “Nope. Then again, most of my colleagues were female.”

  “Like most dudes on Wall Street are white.”

  “Exactly,” he says, and our eyes meet, then part ways.

  “What did your wife think about all this?” I ask.

  “Didn’t believe it either. At least not at first. She thought I was just a shitty professor. And then she simply didn’t want to talk about it. I mean, it was just too tense and confusing for both of us, with all my students giving me positive evaluations but my boss telling me I wasn’t going to get tenure. There was kind of this vibe that if I was a good husband who really loved his wife, I’d figure out how to keep paying the mortgage. You know, from my wife’s perspective, at some point it became more about the bills and the credit cards than it was about how I and this Man Hater felt.”

  Talk on, Professor, I think. Talk.

  And right then, as if Bark’s gun betrays my mistrust, he shuts up on me. He casts. Reels. Casts again. He sighs. I doubt that, right now, he cares at all about catching fish.

  I say, “You stay married?”

  He sets down the fishing gear, rows intently. It’s like he wants to disappear more than I do.

  “Not for long,” he says.

  “And?”

  “And what.”

  “She didn’t love you?”

  Rowing harder, he grins for the sake of making a show of it. “Man, you go right after what counts.”

  “Can you blame me?” I say. “I just want to know if you’re bullshitting me.”

  “About what?”

  “This.” I wave the gun. “Who shot this gun, why we’re on this boat trip, why you have these stupid theories about Man Haters—everything.”

  He glances at the gun, blinks hard. He faces the shoreline and rows on.

  Cliffs flank the stream, purple wildflowers crowded up against both shorelines. It’s tight here, the only way through.

  “At some point after my boss began messing with me,” he says, “my wife became mean.”

  And that’s all he says, with no blue streak attached.

  And I feel sorry for the pudgy sonofabitch. Really feel sorry, like you would for a real friend.

  So I say, “Mean’s hard to love, man.”

  “But, see, Deesh, my wife was cool before we got married. We understood each other. We were on the same team. But that all changed when The Man Hater began making sure I wouldn’t get tenure.”

  “How’d she do that?”

  “Assigned me goals that no human being could possibly reach. And made up lies about me. You make up one good lie about a male professor in a department of women hired and chaired by a Man Hater, that male professor can kiss his career good-bye.”

  He rows on, and I keep the gun aimed, maybe a little lower, but still set. Gnats try to distract me, and I swat at them.

  “So what, then—your wife divorced you?”

  And I feel both of us, on our insides, sinking down.

  He lets go of the oars, grabs a fishing rod, wings a cast that lands his bait smack between two gray rocks. There are plenty of ways not to tell the truth, I think. One of those ways is to run from it.

  Then, after nothing but a sneeze from me, off Gabe goes, on another blue streak, this one about the heart murmur his doctor found just after his divorce, how the sound of that murmur led to his botched surgery, how he now needs to take all sorts of medications, blood thinners and beta-blockers and statins and “whatever,” how side effects from the statins have him trying to replace the statins with plant sterols and red-rice yeast tablets of various dosages. How, yeah, there’s been Percocet as well as on-and-off reliance on antidepressants, how, yes, it causes him shame but he probably needs to admit to depression, how he has these “little episodes.”

  “What do you mean, ‘little episodes’?”

  “It’s just a little hard to see sometimes,” he says. “Things get blurry. Sometimes I black out. But usually not for very long.”

  And there I sit, across from this ill man in his boat, my own body perfectly healthy as far as I know, holding a gun on him.

  “Because you need me, right, Deesh?” Gabe says. He rows very hard, but he’s playing it up, grinning like a maniac. “Without me,” he all but shouts, “you can’t get to that cabin!”

  He’s jacked up for sure. Reminds me of drunken Friday nights with Bark and James back when we were all cool, and yeah, yeah, I’m smiling, but fuck him.

  “Which I’m happy to do,” he says seriously. “But you do realize a guy can’t expect to be a hundred percent, particularly after they saw him open and slice up his ticker—right?”

  Bullshit, I think. Bullshit.

  Get him talking again. About heart surgery. He’ll mess up fast if he’s not being completely straight.

  So I say, “From what I’ve heard, man, not too long after heart surgery, a lot of people feel great. Hell, they run marathons.”

  “That’s if you had a little bypass,” he says. “I had two new valves put in.”

  “Valves are a bigger deal than a bypass?”

  “Mine were.” He inhales slowly through his nose, lets a breath out through his intentionally open mouth, and I think, He is unreal, with this bullshit. But there’s no bringing him back now, gone as he is into a new blue streak, this one about how, in his case, the surgeon “bungled” the suturing on of the new valves. How anyway that was if you asked Gabe’s lawyer. How of course if you asked his surgeon, his surgeon did a perfectly fine job, and how the surgeon has a team of fourteen doctors and nurses and technicians to back him up. How what he, Gabe, was now trying to say—to me, Deesh, today—was that these fourteen people were all trained professionals who were there, completely awake, doing what they did for a living. And he was of course out, completely anesthetized, so who was he to say that the surgeon botched it?

  And I notice his face has gone bone pale, with sweat dripping through his sideburns.

  I gesture toward his heart and say, “But he botched it.”

  And he nods. After inhaling and holding his breath to maybe decide something, he goes off, this time half softly, to let me know, just between me and him, that he did have a stroke four months after the surgery, right about when he was supposed to be feeling—as I aptly put it—like running a marathon. That when any heart surgeon saws a guy open and cuts out two of his valves and sews on new ones, a primary goal after they staple the guy shut is that there be no clotting, and clotting is what caused his stroke. That a clot did in fact go to his brain, and this clot “almost certainly” formed near one of the new valves.

  And everyone, Gabe needs to tell me, knows there shouldn’t have been clotting. And based on all this, the lawyer he hired more than a year ago has been badgering the offending heart surgeon for a monetary settlement that would make things at least somewhat close to fair, if not a do-over surgery. But, see, this lawyer of Gabe’s has been getting the runaround for months. He’s just a rinky-dink personal injury guy from Scranton, so he and Gabe are, in the eyes of the world, just poor suckers in Pennsylvania up against a renowned heart surgeon and a hospital owned by a billion-dollar conglomerate. Realistically speaking, Gabe has a piss-poor chance. Between his failed ma
rriage and a few other “mishaps” he doesn’t want to get into for my sake, his general prospects have taken kind of a hit lately.

  And you’re blitzing on Perc, I think.

  And, no, he’s not done talking. And sweating more. And still pale if not another shade near pure white. But I’m with him again, listening, if for no other reason than to keep the gun aimed. And he sure is now off again, about how he’s no longer represented by this rinky-dink Scranton lawyer—not really, since this lawyer just last week demanded another retainer to keep on fighting. How there’s no money, certainly no cash anywhere Gabe is aware of, for another retainer. He’s already taken out a home equity loan on that shack of a house his fishing guide business barely keeps afloat, and his ex-wife, who has been remarried to a jackass for years now, would never give or lend him cash.

  How his failure at trying to be a literature professor left him bad-mouthed and isolated and “fairly friendless.”

  How, so, yeah, he has no one else to go to.

  And we let this sink in some, too, on top of everything else, and I think, Damn.

  And then I need to admit: I’m close to believing his whole story.

  It’s almost to the point that, if someone’s out there offering a reward for my capture, I want this guy to have it.

  42

  JAN

  TWO DAYS LATER, Tug and I and Colleen and my mother and Jasper and a couple volunteers who were strangers to the Corcorans joined sheriffs to begin searching the woods and meadows within a five-mile radius of the track for any sign at all of Tom Corcoran. We checked abandoned fox dens and kicked aside fallen leaves, turning up pop bottles and twelve-pack cartons and cigarette filters but little more, and often, while we searched, Tug lagged behind to check areas the others might have glossed over too quickly.

  This part of the search lasted nearly three days, Tug insisting on there being a third after the volunteers had quit to tend to personal matters.

  And then, on the day after that third day, Tug returned to the grandstand convinced Tom would be there, only to get another choral refrain of the silent treatment, and I have to admit it was that afternoon that I, too, found myself generally unable to say much around Tug, because, really, the more you saw business at the track and elsewhere carry on as usual without Tom, the less it seemed possible that he would return—and, well, who wanted to dish truths like that in some conversation you could never take back?

  What I’m saying is, I didn’t want to lie to Tug about my lack of hope, or, for that matter, encourage him to feel like his family’s future was rosy when pretty much everything suggested it wasn’t. So the best default reaction for me to have to Tom’s absence, it seemed, was to say nothing around Tug, to even let Tug sprint off on his own after we’d left the house to run together at night.

  At dawn on the following morning, Tug convinced Jasper to join him in a search of the lake’s entire shoreline, including a far stretch that was part of a nature preserve. After they did this using both a canoe and fishing waders, Tug decided that his staying put in the grandstand had been sentimental foolishness at best. Late that afternoon, he persuaded Colleen to have internet service connected despite the long-held Corcoran family belief that they, being down-to-earth horse folk, would always avoid the lure of social media, and Tug spent his first day online googling Corcoran and Tom Corcoran and Tommy Corcoran + Jockey and so on, finding that there was very little information about Tom posted, mostly just county records of Tom’s previously secret DUI arrest back when Tug was roughly two years old.

  There also wasn’t much about my father, but then again my father’s jockeying glory days had happened going on decades ago now, and soon Tug was back to searching in the real world, jogging up and down dirt roads near the track and the Corcoran house, sometimes on lanes cleared through woods for the sake of electrical transformers and wiring, sometimes down exercise paths leading to streams feeding the area’s numerous lakes, some public, some private, some on easements subject to dispute. Tug’s hope felt strongest on the various grown-over paths leading to three generally unfished ponds; he took his time on these, trying his best to see through the thick brush, grateful for any sunlight that helped him decipher mammals as small as woodchucks beyond the layers of leaves and branches, even though this fondness for the sun made him wish we were running in the dark.

  And he was on his way home from the last of those unfished ponds when the Galaxie stopped beside him and Jasper rolled down its window and said he’d just learned that Tom Corcoran’s file was now middle priority.

  And it wasn’t long at all after Jasper said those words—middle priority—that the deepest breaths Tug could take couldn’t reach the bottoms of his lungs.

  But Tug didn’t tell me about this then.

  He acted cool, often keeping as still and quiet around me as a veteran thoroughbred cooped up in a dingy stall, waiting knowingly.

  43

  DEESH

  THE STREAM GROWS WIDER, all flat and curvy and snaking its way toward thicker woods, the current slower. Gabe is breathing easier, and he’s not sweating, as far as I can tell. “Obviously you have problems of your own,” he says. “Probably one or two no one out there has a clue about.”

  “Not really,” I say, and it hits me that I might try to match his hell-on-earth story with one of my own, if for no other reason than to let him know that I, too, can mess with a stranger’s head by going off forever on a blue streak. And, yeah, maybe I’m falling for a con now by giving him what he wants—a story about me he’s earned by telling me all about himself. But I’m doing it. I’m telling him one, a good one. I’m telling him the one about me that very few men know, the one about how I was walking to school one morning on 212th Street, back when I was maybe in fourth grade, maybe in third—either way, just a kid. How I was barely awake that morning and walking alone and doing exactly what I always did when I walked alone back then, scanning the pavement for money. How, more often than you’d expect, I’d find a penny or two. How once I’d found a twenty tucked behind the cellophane of a crumpled cigarette pack. How on this particular morning I saw no money, saw nothing until it was too late, because four of my classmates had surrounded me. How they held me. How three of them yanked me off the sidewalk, then lowered me headfirst down a manhole. How the fourth kid replaced the steel cover to trap me in. How I was freaked as much by claustrophobia as by how quickly a bright morning could turn dark. How I felt too scrawny to remove the cover. How I clutched the slippery footholds. How, after I would finally raise the cover maybe an inch, the wheel of a car or truck or bus would slam it down.

  Gabe, listening to this, has quit rowing.

  “That is some shit,” he says. “Not exactly like heart surgery, but similar. I mean, that feeling you get right when you start to go under—”

  “That’s not the point, Gabe,” I say, and I realize that, damn, I actually want him to hear me out. “My point is they did this to me because they knew I had a crush on a girl. And you know how it goes when you’re a boy that age. Liking girls so much that it shows is for sissies.”

  Gabe nods, possibly cool with this, cool with the truth that, between him and me, I have personal shit to say, too.

  “You’re right,” he says. “That was how it went. I forgot all about that.”

  And it’s then that his eyes remind me I’m still holding the gun, which has gotten good at keeping aim.

  Then there’s nothing but the sound of the tiny splashes made by his oars.

  The blue streaks, it seems, are over.

  Gabe says, “So what was her name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “The girl you had the crush on when they put you in that manhole.”

  A crow launches itself across the stream. I think, Why can’t the gray-assed bird be singing near us now?

  “Madalynn,” I say.

  �
�And was your crush on her . . . requited?”

  “Not at first. She was like the other girls; she hated boys, too. And a few years later, when liking boys was cool, she was into older guys—I mean high school guys. But she’d give me these little looks when I’d catch her on the street acting lovey-dovey with one of them.”

  “Her being with them didn’t tick you off?”

  Keep the gun close, I think. He’s just trying to win you over.

  I raise the barrel higher, loosen my wrist.

  “No,” I say. “Or if it did, I got over it. I mean, back then I never believed I had a chance with her. Plus, you know: I loved her. Anyway I finally won her over when I was in high school myself.”

  “When you were the basketball star.”

  I nod.

  “And that didn’t tick you off?”

  “Why would it?”

  “Gold digging.”

  I shrug. “There wasn’t a one of us who wasn’t trying to get out of the Bronx, man.”

  “So let me guess,” Gabe says. “You finally dated her for a while, but when you proposed, she said no.”

  “No. Loved her like crazy, finally slept with her, then slept with her every night for a while. But, no, I did not ask her to marry me.”

  I check the woods on both sides. I wish Gabe hadn’t started us talking. I wish I’d never been through a lot of what my memory feels loaded with.

  Plus, now I can feel Gabe studying my face.

  He says, “But eventually she did care about you.”

  “Eventually.”

  “Loved you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You don’t think she felt it from the start?”

  “I don’t know. Can a girl love a kid who’s scared?”

  And it’s just after I ask this, just after we’ve passed pink, silver-flecked boulders, that Gabe stops rowing. He holds his oars at most an inch out of the water, his focus on what I’m guessing is some hick near the shoreline not far from us, and I think: If I’m going down today, shoot me dead right now, while I watch this glistening water.